This invention relates generally to paging systems and in particular to a universal PSTN page entry protocol arrangement wherein each of the telephone inputs of an associated paging terminal may accommodate a telephone device or alternatively a computer or paging terminal as desired.
Paging systems typically in the past have comprised a paging terminal which controls a paging transmitter for broadcasting paging signals to a number of associated radio pagers. Each of the pagers include a unique paging address so that the system's pagers may be selectably addressed. This requires the appropriate encoding of the paging signal before broadcasting which customarily is effected within the paging terminal itself. A memory holds the appropriate addresses of each of the pagers within the system which may be extracted as needed. Until recently, users wishing to initiate a "page" to a radio pager wearer needed only to call the terminal over a telephone, public or private, and request such pager, usually identified by a page number. The unit to be called could be either tone only or tone and voice. In any event, the calling device from the caller to the paging terminal was by telephone line over a conventional telephone set.
With the advent of the numeric and alphanumeric display pagers, however, a simple telephone call is not always sufficient. Today's paging terminals must be compatible with two distinct and separate classes of callers, i.e., human callers and mechanical (computer/terminal) callers.
Until now the paging terminal included separate cards or modules to accommodate the various paging callers. For human callers using a conventional telephone, a telephone input is included in the associated paging terminal apparatus wherein an included DTMF detector is provided for accepting and processing dialed-in digits. For computer/terminals, a dedicated telephone input must be provided which further includes a modem. Accordingly, there are two separate and distinct cards or modules that heretofore must have been provided in the paging terminal. Consequently, there could well be an under-utilization for one type of caller while effecting an overloading regarding the other type, with no clear cut efficient way of addressing such undesired unbalance.